Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume4 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 15===

A distant, deep rumbling physically shook the hallway.

“That was some match, huh? But with tens of thousands of viewers, we can’t end the stream now just because there were only two matches today. So get ready for a surprise performance from everyone’s favorite edgy idol – Cinderella Queen!! You there! The rock band, concert band, cheer squad, cheerleaders, and anyone else who wants to be the center of attention!! Get up here on the stage!! A million cameras and drones await you. The entertainment industry isn’t gonna give you any attention if you let a little thing like shame get in your way!!”

Utagai Karuta left the heliport and leaned against the wall in a deserted hallway.

He was in bad shape.

Orpheus’s Orchestra was gone and Machibula Delphi was out of tricks. But even if he had robbed her of the ability to cause cataclysmic events with the power of the stars, he could not keep her from struggling with her own arms and legs.

Nevertheless, he had won.

He had to get back with that report.

He needed to inform the innocent crystal girl who had refused to set foot outside her unlocked cage even though she had been framed.

[[Image:ApocalypseWitch_v04_bw6.png|thumb]]

“Aine.”

“Yes, Sacri-sama?”

“It’s over and there’s nothing more to worry about, so give us a chance to apologize.”

She finally took that one step over the threshold. She left the boxy student counseling room and entered the freedom of the hallway. Those invisible bonds no longer existed.

And she did something other than lower her head in front of him. She pressed her forehead against his chest, which was not exactly broad or muscular.

She said nothing.

He only felt her trembling.

She may have been holding something inside without it showing on her face.

Their classmates gathered around. Yamane Deiri shrugged and Nekoumi Hirosuke gave Karuta a jealous look. Those beat up warriors had all fought that 300m electric battleship until Machibula Delphi was no longer able to fight and her slaves had surrendered. The looks on their faces said they wouldn’t feel right with themselves until they had bowed down and apologized, but they had enough tact to not interrupt this.

So it was someone unaware of the situation who got time moving again.

“Senpai,” called a voice.

Karuta let Aine stay where she was while he looked to see Natalena Blast hesitantly approaching. That avenger girl had once infiltrated Second Grimnoah all on her own in order to slaughter the world’s strongests, but she had regained the ordinary sensibilities that made a small middle school girl nervous when approaching the giants from high school.

She was the type to do her duty even when it was forced onto her, so she held a report to her small chest. Since she was wearing the short maid costume again, it looked more like she was holding fliers to hand out to passersby.

“Um, I have some results for what you asked me to investigate, so I thought I would give you a report.”

“Huh? What’s this about an investigation?” asked Yamane Deiri, leading Maid Natalena to hide behind Karuta’s back.

She grabbed at his shirt with both hands, but Yamane himself didn’t seem too bothered by her fearful reaction. Strangely, it was Nekoumi Hirosuke who bit at a handkerchief (and glared at Karuta).

The middle school girl failed to notice that as she responded.

“He asked me to investigate the identity of the human string pullers.”

“Hey, is that true, Karuta-chan?”

Karuta nodded.

He and the rest of the Four Living Gods were too busy looking into the tournament contestants. And they would have a hard time surprising the string pullers who were constantly watching them. So how were they supposed to figure out who had used the tournament to put Karuta in such a bind? They had needed the help of someone outside their immediate group of four.

Natalena raised her index finger.

“It seems the hidden string pullers got a little overeager during your battle outside the ring. They were watching a lot more carefully, hoping you would make some kind of mistake, so they got careless. This probably would have taken longer if not for that.”

“Huh, was this like a sliver lining?” asked Yamane.

“I-I would say it’s more like a reason to never let your guard down. Eh heh heh,” added Nekoumi.

“Don’t ask me,” pouted the small maid using Karuta as a shield. She seemed more instinctually cautious when it came to Nekoumi than Yamane.

Karuta felt bad about it, but he couldn’t deny Natalena was extremely cute when she bristled like a hissing cat.

“(Also, you should have called me to help with that fight, Senpai. You work me so hard, but then, um, you start treating me like a child when it’s time to fight.)”

“Natalena?”

“Never mind. I didn’t manage to track down the string pullers themselves, but, um, they slipped through an off-limits door and climbed up to an observation tower. The electric locks aren’t perfect, but we use a proprietary offline system that requires a special connecter to hook up your phone or tablet and send it a special unlocking program. There are only three of those connectors on the ship, including the spares. If you see which one has been stolen, you can, um, uh, find some traces the culprit left, like sweat, oils, footprints, and body odor. Not even an expert can avoid sweating at all on the equator like this.”

“Did they appear to be in enough of a rush to make a mistake like that?”

“If they had been thinking straight, I doubt they would have used the off-limits observation tower at all. Um, there were plenty of places where they could have mixed in with the crowd and still gotten a good look.”

Interesting.

Karuta was thankful their system required that physical connector. Especially so soon after that digitally altered video had caused Aine so much trouble. If they had to rely on the records from a security camera or sensors, they might have needed to worry about the accuracy of that data.

“Understood, Natalena. Arrange to have those connectors investigated immediately. But now that you’ve gotten so close to them, they might view you as a target as well. You need to be on your guard around the clock from now-”

Utagai Karuta’s words came to an abrupt end.

They had been forcibly cut off by an external force.

That force was the sound of footsteps. They were awfully loud…and not just because the hallway was relatively deserted thanks to Delane’s surprise concert. It didn’t matter that the world’s strongest magicians were gathered here or that they were approaching the truth about the human string pullers. Whoever was there still made themselves the center of attention.

“…”

Someone was there.

They were coming this way.

The gorgeous girl wore her exceptionally long blonde hair in large ringlets. She was either Karuta’s age or a little older, so 16 or 17.

“''Who…are you?''” Karuta groaned.

“''Pendet Denpasar.''”

Her manner of dress, on the other hand, was very casual.

It looked like athletic wear for dance lessons: a casual tank top and puffy dance pants. On her feet, she wore basketball shoes designed for pure functionality. The outfit’s imbalance with her physical allure actually accentuated her sex appeal.

“I am your next opponent. Or should I say your last?”

“Kh.”

His next opponent.

That meant she had won all of her matches to reach the finals, just like he had.

She was what stood between him and keeping riots from erupting all over the world.

“Utagai. Utagai Karuta.”

She laughed.

The girl named Pendet kept her hands in her puffy pants pockets as she whispered seductively to him.

“It sounds like you’ve gone to a lot of trouble, but I’m afraid the truth you have worked so hard to find will not save you.”

“Get lost!”

The first to boil over was Yamane Deiri, not Karuta.

He took a large step forward, presumably to grab her collar.

“Quit acting like you know a damn thing what we’re-”

The entire right half of Yamane’s body was torn away.

Or it would have if Karuta hadn’t shoved him aside at the last second. Crystal shards sparkled in the air as Karuta’s friend’s right arm and leg simply seemed to vanish.

“Yamanen!!”

Karuta knew he had to make sure this wasn’t fatal. He pulled off his belt and started to wrap it around the wound, but he had trouble. With the entire arm gone, he had nothing to really tie the belt around.

He had to do something. Stopping the bleeding was easier said than done. It differed from person to person, but a human could only lose around 1.5 liters of blood before it killed them. Open the faucet, and they had less than 30 seconds before they died. Yet Karuta’s vision blurred as he watched the red spreading out before his eyes. There was so much noise he had trouble grasping the concepts of time and space.

“Move!”

With several high-pitched sounds, it was Matsuda Imi who stepped forward. He recalled that she used Neith, an Egyptian medical goddess.

“There isn’t time to tie off the wounds. Yamane, ''I’m going to cauterize the wounds.'' Have him bite a handkerchief or something!!”

“Imi…?”

Amaashi Marika’s voice carried a questioning tone.

But Matsuda Imi only held down the convulsing boy and raised her voice.

She had the look of someone who had already overcome this.

“Marika, what you did was awful, but I can’t deny it was the right thing to do. So help me! He already had his arm blown off by the Chrisbart, right? He only has at most 900mL left, so he’ll die before the regeneration can kick in if we don’t stop the bleeding!!”

Pendet Denpasar did nothing.

She simply grinned with her hands in her baggy pants pockets. She shrugged like that was the same thing as raising her hands.

“Barong, Rangda. Pause. Stop for now.”

Karuta could finally see something there.

Two objects about the size of a boar were circling the ringlet girl like a typhoon. But they had not just started to move. They must have been moving nonstop this entire time. They had only just slowed their rotation speed enough to be visible to the naked eye. They maintained a circle with a diameter of about 3m.

They looked like a collection of wood and cloth.

They made a sound like something beating at the air. A mask carved from wood and a brightly colored cloth sheet formed a body larger than a human. The legs were jointless sticks similar to a mop handle. The beast named Barong had four legs and the monster named Rangda had two. The girl pulled her hands from her pockets and placed them on the heads of the dolls(?) that approached her on either side.

She smiled in a way that suggested everyone there would have died as if shredded by a giant propeller if she had not stopped them.

Pendet whispered lovingly as she used her hands to calm the monsters whose stick legs rapped against the floor like they were tap dancing.

“Hold off for now. We can kill him whenever we like, but rushing things would only bring more harm to us in the process. We can simply wait until the time for his death has arrived.”

This was bad.

This wasn’t an unmanned attack drone or the Chrisbart electric battleship.

This was the truly dangerous ace up the sleeve the Catastrophe had prepared.

Utagai Karuta felt a tingling pain on his skin. This was the pressure of true power. The same indescribable sensation he had felt when facing the Problem Solvers.

Yes.

In the end, ''the real occult'' was the most frightening thing of all.

Utagai Karuta gulped and altered his position to cover Aine and Natalena.

Crystal glittered from Aine’s hand as she drew her sword out of thin air.

“Give me the word, Sacri-sama.”

“No, Aine.”

“We cannot afford to worry about the rules with an opponent like this.”

“Do that and all our efforts go down the drain!! If we don’t follow the rules of our own tournament, the social unrest we hoped to end will explode all over the world. And it isn’t us who’ll die in the frenzy of rioting and looting that follows!!”

He heard laughter.

Pendet Denpasar was looking to Aine in interest.

“That girl is correct here. Utagai Karuta, you are the same as me. Maybe she understands this so well because she too is an inhuman pawn used by a magician.”

He could not give in to her provocation.

Any outburst from him would only be playing into her hands. She couldn’t have made that any clearer.

''Even if Aine was completely right,'' Karuta could not fight the final match outside the ring.

“How much do you know?”

“Perhaps everything.”

“Where did you come from? What connection do you have to the human string pullers!?”

“If you want to know, meet me in the ring tomorrow.”

The blonde ringlet girl laughed some more and released her hands from the two masks.

“Play. In 360-degree surround sound, okay?”

With a roaring of wind, Barong and Rangda vanished into thin air once more. No, they had sped up too fast for human eyes to follow.

They formed a circle.

An inviolable holy ground had formed around her.

She stood at the eye of the storm where nothing could touch a hair on her head. She put her hands back in her baggy pants pockets and calmly stepped away from Karuta.

“I look forward to seeing you in the final round. Assuming the answer you have found doesn’t break your spirit, of course.”